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Monday, June 29, 2020

The Mobs Are Coming for the Progressives

By On June 29, 2020
Forget the Confederacy. The Socialist Taliban pulling down statues have gone after Confederate statues, but their real targets have been the civic monuments that symbolized unity and progressive politics.

In Madison, Black Lives Matter protesters toppled the Lady Forward statue that allegorically represents the state’s progressive politics. With its American flag, feminine iconography, and Lincoln reference, the Lady Forward statue embodies the old progressive ideas that the Marxist thugs are destroying.

Toppling Lady Forward, like banishing Theodore Roosevelt’s equestrian statue, accompanied by an Indian and a black man to symbolize the former president’s friendship for other races, from the American Museum of Natural History, another icon of progressive symbolism, is no accident.



Confederate statues aren’t very threatening to the leftist cause, but the old progressivism, rooted in the conviction that America was a basically good country that would come to fully embody goodness, is still a competitor for the hearts and minds of the people that BLM and Antifa would like to see join them.

It’s also why the Emancipation Memorial, depicting Lincoln and a freed slave, is a threatening image. The previous assaults on Lincoln, Grant, Union commanders, and even the ‘Glory’ memorial to an African-American Civil War regiment, are not the work of ignorant people, but of radicals who are attacking the symbols of the progressive historical narrative that they hate because it undermines their agenda.

The Union iconography tells a story of the end of slavery. The Black Lives Matter narrative is that slavery never ended, not only in the South, not with the end of Segregation, and not even in the 21st century.

America was born in sin and never stopped being a racist society built on white supremacy.

Many critics of the 1619 Project have missed the most important point, which is that the revisionist history not only falsely accuses America of having been built around slavery, but is a component of a larger argument that slavery still exists today and operates using disguised modern institutions.

The movement to defund the police, like the rest of the criminal justice reform impetus, derives from the conspiracy theory that the justice system is modern slavery, with the police as the slave catchers. Police officers, prosecutors, and even people who call the police, white or black, are the slave catchers, sellers, and informants in a racist system that cannot be redeemed, but must be entirely destroyed.

To radicals who think this way, Lincoln being presented as the man who freed the slaves is a myth that prevents people from seeing the truth. And the entire progressive narrative of history is a racist lie covering up the truth that slavery and Jim Crow did not end and won’t end as long as ‘whiteness’ exists.

The significance of the kneeling black man in the Emancipation Memorial, now targeted for destruction, is not subservience to Lincoln. Instead, it reflects the moment when freed slaves in Richmond knelt before President Lincoln, only to be told to, “kneel only to God and thank Him for your freedom”.

Post-Civil War Republicans attached great significance to this mutual liberation and religious unity, but to the Marxists of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, the religious connotations are meaningless. Much like the biblical verse on the Liberty Bell, the theological convictions that fueled pre-war abolitionism and post-war integration are completely alien to their irreligious radical descendants.

The radicals tearing down statues see religion as enslaving, not liberating. That’s one possible reason so many churches and synagogues were vandalized during the Black Lives Matter riots across America.

Emancipation once meant that slaves were freed from slavery and that the nation was freed from the sin of slavery. That 19th century political theology has long since been discarded to argue that emancipation, for the former slaves or for the nation, is impossible. The conjunction of critical race theory and black nationalism contend that the original sin wasn’t really slavery, but whiteness.

America will be as racist and oppressive as it is white. The only way to advance is through destruction.

The progressives envisioned a modern America. The three Republican presidents so iconic to progressives, Lincoln, Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt, were the pivotal figures in the making of that modern America with a strong central government and an eye on the next century, until Woodrow Wilson and FDR flipped the script and the Republicans became the conservative political party.

The progressive memorials to them are being targeted for removal and demolition to bury that vision.

Today, the leftists who call themselves progressives, claim to believe in progress. But where the old progressives believed that America was, at the heart of it, a progressive enterprise, they believe that it was always reactionary. The old progressives claimed that they wanted to rediscover the nation’s fundamental progressive values. The new progressives don’t believe that there is any such thing though some, like Barack Obama, were expert at echoing the old progressives to win over modern liberals.

Destroying the work of the old progressives has more in common with the Taliban than just the demolition of old statues. Like Islamic theocrats, the leftist mobs are destroying symbols of heresy. The heresy embodied by everything from the Emancipation Memorial to the multiracial trio of Theodore Roosevelt and two minority men, is that racial progress is inevitable because of American values.

An idea that, until recently, was almost universally held by most Democrats and liberals, is being symbolically destroyed to make way for the new theology of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi.

The larger symbolism is that the only way to redeem America is to destroy it as a nation.

There was a great deal that was wrong, foolish, and destructive in the old progressives, who burdened us with an endlessly expanding state, a conviction that science and technology can solve everything, and the delusion that the purpose of a nation is to progress to some unspecified social utopia, but they were, above all else, optimists who believed that things would get better if we wanted them to.

The new progressives occasionally mime optimism, but they are really savage pessimists.

One of the fundamental dividing lines between moderates and extremists is despair. Moderates are optimists, sometimes foolishly and wrongly so, while the extremists believe that the situation is irredeemable unless the most extreme measures are applied to tear apart and remake society.

While the media insists that its political allies are moderates, their destructiveness and despair mark them as extremists whose essential message is that we can only be saved by destroying everything.

From Jonestown to CHOP, despair is the inevitable outcome of utopian ambitions. The fanatics who are convinced that the world must be saved or damned, that there is no middle ground between racism and social justice, pursue apocalyptic revolutions while seeking to punish the public for the lack of progress.

The Emancipation Memorial and the Confederate statues both arose out of a conviction that we must forgive and love each other. The statue vandals are equally convinced that there cannot be forgiveness, only hate. The Americans who tried to knit the nation together after the Civil War believed that only God could judge and forgive the blood that had been shed on both sides. The Marxist mobs believe that there is no god, only the inescapable momentum of history bending its arc inevitably toward justice.

And that justice and vengeance is their birthright and their heritage.

It’s not the Confederacy, long defeated, they are out to kill, but the thing that all radicals hate the most, the moderate ideas on their own side that compete with them for the hearts and minds of their base.

The mobs are coming for the old progressives and the declining liberals, for anyone who still believes that unity is more important than division, and that we can find common ground through forgiveness.

It’s not the Confederacy they’re after: it’s any alternative to a violent revolution.

Liberals had excused the trends in the black community that replaced Martin Luther King with Malcolm X, and civil rights with black nationalism. They had defended the rise of white radicals on campuses, and then watched passively as those radicals took over government offices, academia, and corporations.

The chickens, as Malcolm X and Jeremiah Wright liked to say, are coming home to roost.

The mobs aren’t just here to smash up old Confederate officers. They’re out to destroy Lincoln and Grant, to tear down the Columbus statues erected by Italian immigrant groups who wanted to plant a civic flag to show they belonged, and the statues of assorted Union officers put up by other patriotic immigrant groups to show that they too had a place in the nation.

And what the mobs are out to destroy, most of all, is that old liberal vision of America. And, by the time they’re done, if there are any liberals still left, they will throw them in the same rivers and fires in which they’re casting those old symbols of progress, the explorer who defied the skeptics, the men who envisioned a representative republic, the emancipation of the slaves, and a modern America.

The mobs are coming for our history and our future. They’re coming for America and for progress. Americans used to believe that things will get better. The mobs are here to destroy that hope.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Hundreds of Streets and Schools are Named After a Black Nationalist Ally of the KKK

By On June 28, 2020
Boston and Dallas have one each. New York City has not one, but two Malcolm X boulevards, along with a playground. Washington D.C. has Malcolm X Avenue. The Los Angeles City Council renamed the intersection near the Bilal Islamic Center, Malcolm X Way.

These are a few of the hundreds of streets, schools, and assorted other civic infrastructure named after the black supremacist leader who worked together with the KKK and the American Nazi Party.

“I sat at the table myself with the heads of the Ku Klux Klan,” Malcolm X later admitted.



There's a Malcolm X statue in Harlem, and the racist leader's family home in Omaha is listed by the Park Service in the National Register of Historic Places even though he became famous preaching the Nation of Islam’s theology that white people are devils created by a mad scientist and would be killed by UFOs.

The Postal Service even came out with a stamp for a racial separatist who campaigned for a separate black country, and against racial intermarriage.

"Check up on these integration leaders, and you will find that most of them are either married to or hooked up with some white woman," Malcolm X ranted. “No black person married to a white person can speak for me!"

These racist beliefs made Malcolm X a natural ally of the KKK in fighting against civil rights.

In 1961, Malcolm X met with members of the Klu Klux Klan in Atlanta to work together on an alliance against the civil rights movement. The meeting was the result of secret diplomacy between Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and Klan leader J.B. Stoner who would later be convicted of the bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham. While Muhammad and Stoner put on a public show of attacking each other to increase their stature, behind the scenes the NOI and KKK were allies.

Even as Klansmen bombed black churches like Bethel, they would leave the NOI’s mosques alone.

While Malcolm X would later blame this “conspiracy” on Elijah Muhammad, the NOI leader, the former Malcolm Little was a child of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) which had previously allied with the Klan and praised Hitler.

“Between the Klu Klux Klan and the NAACP group, give me the Klan,” Garvey had once said.

Alliances between white supremacists and black supremacists would continue under Louis Farrakhan’s leadership of the Nation of Islam. These racist alliances now date back for at least a century.

Malcolm X and his Klan counterparts both agreed that there was a superior race that would defeat the inferior race. They both saw integrationists as their enemies and blamed the Jews for everything.

“The Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool,” Malcolm X told the KKK.

The man now honored as a civil rights leader also suggested that the Klan kill white civil rights activists, or as Malcolm X called them, “traitors who assisted integration leaders”

The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner came three years later. Viola Liuzzo was killed the year after that. By then, Malcolm X had joined her as a casualty of his former hate group.

The great historical irony is that a black nationalist ally of the Klan who had fought the civil rights movement and encouraged the murders of men like Chaney and Goodman has become a definitive civil rights figure, while Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's march with MLK is airbrushed out of movies.

Malcolm X had never made any secret of his rabid anti-Semitism.

“Jews run the country,” he once declared.

While Malcolm X’s meeting with the KKK was briefly kept secret (though at least one of Little’s fellow Nation of Islam ministers had participated in a Klan rally), his flirtation with the American Nazi Party became very public that same year when Malcolm X delivered a racial separatist speech to an audience that included George Lincoln Rockwell and other members of his American Nazi Party.

Malcolm X introduced George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, on stage, led a round of applause for the Neo-Nazi leader, and called him, “Mr. Rockwell.”

Behind the scenes, the NOI and ANP had worked out an agreement of “mutual assistance”.

Some will protest that Malcolm X rejected his racist views when he traded in the Nation of Islam and adopted mainstream Islam. And yet we are told that we must judge every historical figure, every statue and street name now being denounced as racist, for their worst moments, not their best ones.

There is an obvious hypocrisy in allowing Malcolm X to grow, but not any American historical figure.

Malcolm X did change, but he didn’t stop being a bigot. Instead he shifted from a racist and religious bigotry to an exclusively religious bigotry. The new Malcolm X could accept the men with blue eyes whom he saw while performing his pilgrimage to Mecca as long as they shared his Islamic religion.

As Andrew Bostom, the historian and author of The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism notes, during his pilgrimage, Malcolm X paid a visit to Hitler’s Mufti, who had lobbied Hitler to kill Jews, and met up with current leaders of the PLO, including Ahmed Shukeiri, who had called for throwing the Jews in the sea.

The year was 1964 and the PLO was not fighting to conquer the West Bank and Gaza, which had been seized by the Arabs in 1948, it was fighting to wipe out the Jews. “Those who survive will remain in Palestine, but I estimate that none of them will survive,” Shukeri would later warn Israeli Jews.

Malcolm X had gone from bonding with the KKK over their mutual anti-Semitism to bonding with a new bunch of Nazis over the mass murder of Jews.

Malcolm X's visit to Gaza took place under Egyptian hegemony, Shukeri was a Nasser puppet, and the civil rights leader was studying his new "moderate" Islam under the auspices of a totalitarian regime that was repressing Coptic Christians and plotting to kill millions of Jews.

The newly tolerant Malcolm X accused "Israeli Zionists" of practicing colonialism in Africa under the authority of their "Jewish prophets" and their "Jewish God". Like so many other antisemites, Malcolm X easily transmuted his old denunciations of Jewish financial dominance into Zionist financial control.

As a Nation of Islam member, Malcolm X had defended the hate group's anti-Semitism by denouncing the "Jews who have been guilty of exploiting the black people in this country, economically." As an Islamist, he raved that, “the number one weapon of 20th century imperialism is zionist dollarism, and one of the main bases for this weapon is Zionist Israel.”

In Malcolm X’s lazy antisemitic stereotype, the Jews were still using money to control black people.

Meanwhile just about every Islamist was controlling Malcolm X. Not only did Malcolm X study at Al Azhar University, the fountainhead of ugly Islamist bigotry, but the head of Saudi Arabia's Muslim World League and Muslim Brotherhood leader Said Ramadan were all teaching Malcolm about Islam.

The old Malcolm X had palled around with the KKK and junior Nazis. The new Malcolm X had finally found the real thing. The Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood saw in Malcolm X an opportunity to bring down the Nation of Islam, whose beliefs had very little to do with the Koran, and to build up an Islamist presence in America. The Nation of Islam fought back and the power struggle killed Malcolm X.

Malcolm X had gone from the KKK to the Islamist networks that would spawn Al Qaeda and ISIS.

After a plane crash, Malcolm X had celebrated the death toll and declaimed, “Why can’t Allah slay crackers for the so-called Negro?”

The PLO would begin a major rash of airline attacks in a few years that would inspire 9/11.

The new Malcolm X was really no different than the old Malcolm X. What both incarnations had wanted was a separatist Muslim state. The old Malcolm X had admired Muhammad Ahmad, the Islamic leader of the Mahdiist Islamic State, who had responded to British efforts to suppress slavery with a brutal campaign by former slave traders that defeated the British forces and enslaved their wives and children.

"Mahdiism has re-established the slave trade, which is now in full vigour, and almost all those slaves who were liberated in the Government days have been sold again as slaves," Father Joseph Ohrwalder, a captured missionary documented while noting the booming demand for “black” slaves.

Malcolm X’s enthusiasm for a jihad for slavery might seem improbable, but so would his alliance with Nazis and the Klan. It was always tyranny, bigotry and repression that captured his imagination.

The former Little was drawn to Sudan, the gateway of the trade in African slaves to the Arab lands, and the launching pad for Islamist efforts to colonize Africa. While great efforts have been taken to portray Malcolm X’s conversion to Islam as an enlightening revelation of racial tolerance, the former racist had just signed on with an international theocratic movement that was beginning a global jihadist campaign.

Should American streets, schools, playgrounds and libraries be named after such a man?

If we are going to question the legitimacy of statues of everyone from Columbus to Jefferson, what possible reason could there be for leaving in place the legacy of a Klan ally and a vicious racist?

Celebrating Malcolm X shows that this is not about racism or slavery. It’s about racial supremacism.

You can ally with the KKK, party with the Nazis, and romanticize Islamic slavery as long as you’re a black nationalist. The Democrats, and their legion of corporate and media allies, can falsely claim that this is about racism. But it’s about the same racial supremacism that led Malcolm X to make common cause with the Nazis and the KKK. And then to study Islam with the murderers of Christians and Jews.

If they want to tear down statues of racists, then there’s one statue in Harlem they can start with

Malcolm X must fall.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Fake Noose And Our Imaginary Noose Problem

By On June 24, 2020
Like the Maytag repairman, things are so quiet that the FBI doesn’t have much to do these days.

That’s why fifteen FBI Special Agents were urgently dispatched to the Talladega Superspeedway to conduct an investigation of the pull rope in Garage Number 4.

The pull rope in Garage Number 4, was probably much the same as the pull ropes in all the other garages, but last week, old number four had been assigned to Bubba Wallace, a NASCAR driver who wore an, “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt and painted “Black Lives Matter” on his car. And so, 15, count ‘em, Feds were dispatched to investigate the provenance of the pull rope in Garage Number 4.



After "a thorough review of the facts and evidence surrounding this event", the 15 FBI Special Agents determined that the rope was not a noose and had been there since October 2019.

To paraphrase, Churchill, never was so little owed to so many for a reason so stupid it’s beyond belief.

Those 15 Special Agents might have been put to better use investigating the Birmingham riots at the beginning of the month when mobs tore down a statue of Charles Linn, a Finnish immigrant and prominent local businessman, who had also served as a Confederate sea captain, attacked the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in Linn Park, and vandalized the Hugo L. Black United States Courthouse and Robert S. Vance Federal Building. Black, aside from being FDR's progressive Supreme Court justice, was also a Klansman, but the mobs don’t know any history that isn’t in Howard Zinn.

The mob also smashed windows, set fires, and burned an American flag in one of those usual peaceful protests turned violent that has racked up over $100 million in insurance claims nationwide.

Not to mention hundreds of law enforcement officers wounded in battles with the leftist thugs.

U.S. Attorney Jay E. Town, and FBI Special Agent in Charge Johnnie Sharp, Jr, who were also in charge of the Great Pull Rope Robbery, issued a statement warning, "we have zero tolerance for those who incite, organize, encourage, or engage in civil unrest, violence, and destructive behavior anywhere in the Northern District of Alabama. And make no mistake, we will bring those individuals to justice who do.”

That was on June 1st.

It would be good to know just how many FBI Special Agents have been assigned to that one.

But fake noose is a serious problem that’s popping up around the country.

There was shock and outrage in Oakland, California when five pull ropes were discovered around Lake Merritt. It was especially shocking because black people are the single largest group in Oakland.

The claim originally came from a Twitter account with the hashtags #Noose, #EndRacism, #MyLifeMatters, #BlackLivesMatter, #BLM, and #NoJusticeNoPeace, when it only needed one hashtag.

#FakeNoose.

Local black residents had actually put them up as exercise equipment.

“Out of the dozen and hundreds and thousands of people that walked by, no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose. Folks have used it for exercise. It was really a fun addition to the park that we tried to create,” Victor Sengbe said.

A hate crime investigation was opened anyway and more patrols were dispatched to Lake Merritt to watch out for pull ropes.

"Intentions do not matter. We will not tolerate symbols of hate in our city. The nooses found at Lake Merritt will be investigated as hate crimes," Mayor Libby Schaaf ranted at a press conference.

“We have to start with the assumption that these are hate crimes,” the white Democrat warned the local black resident. “We cannot take these actions lightly. These symbols are symbols of racial violence, and it is incumbent on all of us to have that sensitivity; to have that knowledge.”

At this rate, Victor may end up being the first black man charged with being a member of the KKK.

Over in New York City, a known hangout of the Klan, in the Bronx borough, which is about a third African-American and half Latino, more nooses were discovered in Van Cortland Park.

"I looked up and saw a noose hanging," Alexandra Haridopolos squawked. "It felt like it was meant to be seen. The other two were right by a walkway, in very good lighting."

Haridopolos is, predictably, a blond white woman, who writes up things like, "Using Postcolonial Theory to Create Writing Opportunities in ESL Classrooms" and "Gender F Extravaganza challenges stale gender roles". But while Haridopolos knows a lot about postcolonial theory, she doesn’t know her nooses.

The NYPD determined that the nooses were actually nylon strings from a pinata. There had recently been a party in the area. And the Bronx is a majority Latino area. But Haridopolos doesn’t buy the NYPD’s explanation, complaining that the police refused to file a complaint about the pinata noose.

"It's clear what this is," she fumed. "Someone knew what they were doing."

Leftists usually do.

Jamaal Bowman, a leftist congressional candidate backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, appeared at a rally and declared, "We will not be intimidated."

By the pinatas.

The rally was organized by Jennifer Scarlott, an elderly white woman who founded Bronx Climate Justice North, which has 98 members, who complained that the NYPD hadn't properly investigated the pinata.

Local Democrats released a statement declaring that, "the location where the rope was found is a common gathering site for family parties, and we cannot allow it to be taken over by fear and racism."

Too late for that.

The noose truthers won’t give up until the FBI dispatches 15 Special Agents to track down the little girl that pinata belonged to and makes her confess her privilege while being yelled at by Jennifer Scarlott.

Noose fever continued in New York City's Harlem where one of the many Klansmen who can be found wearing hoods while striding down nearby Malcolm X Boulevard, apparently ducked into Marcus Garvey Park to plant yet another noose. Marcus Garvey, the original black nationalist, was fond of saying things like, “between the Klu Klux Klan and the NAACP group, give me the Klan" and “hats off to Hitler the German Nazi." But, even so, the Klan isn’t known to hang out in Marcus Garvey Park.

The panic in Garvey Park was once again sparked by someone on social media who decided a construction rope was really a noose.

Governor Cuomo quickly got on the case, sending the New York State Police to help out.

"I am disgusted by the recent discovery of a noose, the epitome of hatred and an evil icon of our nation's racist past in Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park," Cuomo, whose policies are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of black senior citizens in nursing homes in the state, declared.

The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force "thoroughly" investigated the incident and determined that the rope “was left over from a construction scaffold that was removed in the fall. The rope was used to hoist construction materials."

And then got back to investigating anti-Asian and anti-Semitic assaults by mostly black suspects.

But the noose truthers weren’t done yet. Like their fellow 9/11 truthers, they began analyzing photos to determine the exact nature of the rope and its topography, while claiming that there was a cover-up.

Fake noose is a nationwide problem.

In San Francisco, a noose found in a park turned out to be a child’s swing. But the noose truthers went on insisting that it must be a noose.

“It seemed intentional,” the crank who started the problem complained.

In Oklahoma City, a swing set that had been set up by a Latino man for his grandson was misidentified as a noose. “That’s for the great grandkid. And whenever he doesn’t use it, I just took the swing set off because the birds sit there and get the swing set dirty. That’s why it’s hanging when the ropes are by there themselves,” he explained.

Practice gear hanging in a New Jersey fire station was misidentified as a noose and havoc ensued.

“I am appalled by the situation, and hopefully this is an isolated incident,” Mayor Bert Steinmann raved. “I don’t know what to say. Words escape me here. It should have never been there in the first place.”

Much like Mayor Steinmann.

Back in Birmingham, yet more nooses turned up in a city park. And these were actual nooses.

The police investigated and found that they had been hung up for Juneteenth as part of an art project protesting George Floyd’s death.

Finally, the owner of Dave’s Tropical Sno in Pittsburg, Kansas got in trouble because he was selling a watermelon, grape, and cotton candy concoction called Burning Noose.

The black man who came up with the flavor has apologized to the white leftists who were offended.

“I really, truly, want to apologize because I meant no harm and I did not mean for any of this to happen,” Keenan Carter said.

Perhaps Keenan’s apology to white leftists for the historical wrongs done to his people will appease them.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

A Farrakhan Supporter Led the LA Black Lives Matter Rally That Became a Pogrom

By On June 23, 2020
"It’s no coincidence that the riots here escalated in Fairfax, the icon of the Jewish community. I saw the Watts and the Rodney King riots. They never touched a synagogue or house of prayer. The graffiti showed blatant antisemitism. It’s Kristallnacht all over again," Rabbi Shimon Raichik, a Chabad Rabbi in Los Angeles, wrote.

These scenes from what the media has falsely called peaceful protests and the Jewish community in the Fairfax neighborhood of Los Angeles has called the Shavuot Riots, after the biblical holiday during which the worst of the attacks on the community occurred, has fundamentally divided Los Angeles Jews.

After the conclusion of Shavuot and the Shabbat, members of the Jewish community went to pick up the pieces, battling looters and checking out the damage. Even synagogues that had been untouched began evacuating their Torah scrolls to places of safety, unprecedented outside of a major natural disaster.

Aryeh Rosenfeld, an Orthodox Jewish small business owner in the area, described to the Jerusalem Post hearing screams of, "F___ Jews" during the riots and looting as he tried to protect his store.



The looting not only devastated countless small businesses in the area, but graffiti, some of it explicitly anti-Semitic, was scrawled across at least 5 Orthodox Jewish synagogues and 3 religious schools.

“The attack on our community last night was vicious and criminal. Fairfax is the center of the oldest Jewish community in Los Angeles,” Councilman Paul Koretz said. “As we watched the fires and looting, what didn’t get covered were the anti-Semitic hate crimes and incidents."

Melina Abdullah, the lead organizer of Black Lives Matter in LA and a professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State, had been very clear about her motive for bringing her hateful campaign to the area.

"We've been very deliberate in saying that the violence and pain and hurt that's experienced on a daily basis by black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence," the BLM-LA co-founder ranted.

Melina Abdullah has a hateful record of appearing at Farrakhan and Nation of Islam events and praising the antisemitic hate group and its leader. When Facebook decided to remove Farrakhan over his hateful rhetoric toward Jews, the Black Lives Matter LA co-founder came to his defense.

“Facebook and Instagram’s decision to ban The Honorable Minister Farrakhan along with known white-supremacists represents the ultimate in false equivalencies," Abdullah complained. "As a Black community, we should be very wary when others attempt to silence our leaders. We should also think about how to organize beyond social media. I continue to appreciate the Minister’s fearless leadership and intense love for our people.”

Farrakhan has praised Hitler, compared Jews to termites, and had declared, “Those who call themselves ‘Jews,’ who are not really Jews, but are in fact Satan”, claimed, “Hitler was trying to destroy the international bankers controlling Europe”, and boasted, “there has not been a black leader in America locked in a struggle with the Jewish community, but Louis Farrakhan.”

And Abdullah has made no secret of sharing Farrakhan’s hostility toward Jews.

When CNN parted ways with Marc Lamont Hill after he once again endorsed the murder of Jews, Abdullah accused CNN of standing "with a Zionist Israel that murders and terrorizes the Palestinian people." The BLM-LA leader had complained that the Women’s March included “Zionists”.

At the Women’s March, Thandiwe Abdullah, her daughter, now the co-founder of the BLM Youth Vanguard, had said that as a "black Muslim girl, it is very important to me that Black Lives Matter also values the lives of the Muslim women in Palestine" and accused Israel of "genocide".

Thandiwe also spoke at the Fairfax Black Lives Matter protest, where she ranted, “I know you want to tear some s___ up... if you want to set some corporations on fire, you know what? I don’t care about Target burning. I don’t care that capitalism burns. I don’t care that white people in their f____ office buildings are upset."

Not just Melina, but Black Lives Matter LA, had partnered with the Nation of Islam, as she had noted in the past, “Minister Farrakhan was calling on folks not to spend their dollars with the White corporations that keep us oppressed, and so we partnered with the Nation and helped to amplify that call.”

The media not only failed to report the scale of vandalism against Jewish synagogues and schools, but treated it as a mysterious aberration while failing to report that BLM LA’s lead organizer had a history of anti-Semitism, and that BLM-LA had allied with one of the most vicious anti-Semitic hate groups around.

It did not note her own statement that “violence and pain and hurt” should also be “visited” on the people living and working in an area which included one of LA’s major Jewish communities.

The media repeatedly described Abdullah as an activist against police violence while ignoring her affinity for a racist black supremacist hate group whose leader has described Jews as satanic and subhuman.

The level of duplicity and malpractice by the media which covered this up is its own hate crime.

Imagine if a rally by a supporter of the KKK had turned into attacks on black churches and stores. The media would not be pretending that the two events were somehow separate and unrelated.

The national media, the local media, and even the local Jewish media failed to cover these facts.

In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter riots, Los Angeles Jews, like millions of other Americans, found themselves deeply divided between standing with the rioters or their victims. And that unfortunately included some in the Modern Orthodox Jewish community.

After the attacks on synagogues in Fairfax, the major Modern Orthodox synagogues in nearby Beverlywood, the more modern counterpart of the community, conducted Black Lives Matter sessions. Even though these same synagogues had to rush out their Torah scrolls to protect them from a racist mob, they did not voice any pain or outrage, or offer solidarity to their fellow vandalized synagogues.

Unlike the statements by Young Israel and the Agudah, the Orthodox Union failed to even address the attacks on synagogues. Local leaders urged Orthodox Jews, who were the victims of the racist violence, to atone for their imaginary crimes of racism and to take up the hateful slogan of Black Lives Matter.

On a street in Beverlywood, high school kids from one of the more liberal schools in the area chalked slogans denouncing “white silence” and the same police who keep the mansions of their parents safe.

In Fairfax, the more traditional Orthodox Jews, in black pants and white shirts, in dangling tzitzit and black hats, had cheered the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies as they rolled in after the pogrom, and Persian Jews handed out donuts and snacks to the members of the National Guard.

There is an unbridgeable moral gap between the Chabad synagogue that opened its doors to the National Guard and the Modern Orthodox synagogues that opened their doors to black nationalists. And that gap in the Orthodox community can be seen in those teens cheering the LAPD in Fairfax and those chalking slogans against it in Beverlywood. That gap will determine which community has a future.

A community that teaches its children that they are privileged racists and that standing up for Israel and for their own homes and synagogues has to take a back seat to black nationalism, has no future.

As Rabbi Pini Dunner, of the Young Israel of North Beverly Hills, wrote, "If supporting BLM means collective suicide, you can count me out."

Those Jews who have had the courage to speak up have been told that now is not a Jewish moment. This is a time for empathizing with criminals, not for standing up for the victims of anti-Semitism.

Jay Sanderson, the president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, worried that focusing on the attacks on synagogues would detract from the important cause of the protests.

“This is not about us,” Los Angeles Jews have been told.

And yet the vandalism of synagogues and businesses, the cries of, “F___ Jews”, and the “F___ Israel” graffiti on a synagogue eloquently testify to the inescapable truth of anti-Semitism that it is about Jews.

And if Jews don’t stand up when their synagogues and stores are attacked, who will?

Paint can be cleaned off, glass can be swept away, and family savings and dreams can be put away, but there is a bigger price to be paid for failing to stand up to the rise of someone like Melina Abdullah. Bigoted mobs don’t go away when you fail to stand up to them. They gain power and legitimacy. And the price of standing up to them grows while the toll they take with each attack becomes unbearable.

The true moral cost of the Los Angeles Pogrom can be measured in the fact that racists were able to get away with attacking synagogues while intimidating some Jews into keeping quiet and supporting them.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, June 21, 2020

The Jonestowning of America

By On June 21, 2020
Dave Patrick Underwood, an African-American Federal Protective Service officer, was shot and killed at the Ronald V. Dellums Building during the radical riots in Oakland, California. A building named after Congressman Dellums is burdened with its own weight of historical complicity in leftist atrocities.

"Let me commend your pastor, Jim Jones, for the dedication he is showing to his community and surrounding areas," Congressman Dellums once wrote. "And also for impact he makes on members of his congregation."

At Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery, some distance from the riots, a plaque over a mass grave reads, “In memory of the victims of the Jonestown tragedy". The names on the plaque include that of Jim Jones.

Jones, who called cops “pigs” and posed with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers, told his mostly black followers to die horrifyingly of cyanide poisoning to resist the racism of the United States of America.

The white leftist who claimed to uphold the value of black lives killed hundreds of black people.



Radicals call for a reckoning with America’s history. But they have not reckoned with their own history that played out much more recently than 1619. 1970s Jonestown has become their model for America.

Jonestown is much more relevant to what is going on in America now than the current revisionist history of Jamestown embraced by the radicals. And there is no more obvious barometer for the lost reckoning than the plaque which lists Jones as one of the victims of a tragedy, instead of a mass murderer. Calling the socialist massacre a tragedy suggests that Jonestown, like the USSR, was a noble cause that failed.

Talk to lefties of a certain age about Jonestown and they’ll mumble about CIA mind control experiments and FBI COINTELPRO operations against activists who wanted to bring about social change. The mass grave in Oakland, like the mass graves in Cambodia, the USSR, and Communist China, are uncomfortable realities. And while mainstream media narratives don’t go that far, they erase what Jones stood for.

The mad mob scenes in Oakland and across California with the power of the Democrat establishment behind them, the viral videos of white millennials kneeling and confessing their privilege, are the People's Temple writ large on a nation. Jones, the son of a Klansman, who was inspired by a Communist-allied cult to build a following as a Marxist preacher of interracial brotherhood, joining the California Democrat establishment before going down in flames, has once again become the future.

Jones ran a leftist cult of white leaders who called themselves black and exploited their mostly black congregation, endorsing the Black Panthers and other black nationalist terror groups, while serving as a core political organization for California Democrats, including former Governor Jerry Brown.

The stain of Jim Jones is still all over California. A generation of California Democrat leaders either allied with Jones or were mentored by Jones’ political allies like Willie Brown. That includes both Senator Kamala Harris and Governor Newsom. That’s why, decades later, California is still stuck in Jonestown.

Jim Jones is "what you should see every day when you look in the mirror", Governor Jerry Brown gushed. It's not what we see. But it's what Brown saw. And what so many Democrats see.

"Revisiting Peoples Temple's goals of apostolic socialism and racial reconciliation offer important insights for understanding the group's legacy that can contribute insight into ways of solving ongoing social problems related to poverty and racial inequality in the United State," David Feltmate, an associate professor of Sociology at Auburn University, has argued.

Such calls are not unique. Like lefty histories of the USSR, historians, academics, and even PBS, seek to extract Jones’ good politics from his bad ending while refusing to recognize that they are intertwined.

There are certainly insights in Jones’ methodology of fleecing and humiliating wealthy white lefties, and exploiting elderly African-Americans who thought that the Peoples Temple would take care of them for the rest of their lives, only to be killed when the apostolic socialist cult collapsed under its own abuses.

All of that could have been avoided if the media hadn’t covered it up until one of their own got killed.

The Jonestown model is also the model for the Democrat Party which, like Jones, lures in upscale whites by playing on their idealism and guilt, humiliating them to keep them from seeing that the whole thing is a scam, and using the black people it lured in with promises of a social safety net to claim moral superiority. Add in a streak of terror and thuggery to keep everyone in line, along with a dash of sexual sadism to compromise and destroy the moral integrity of core cult members, and you have utopia.

Exploiting racism was central to the appeal of the Peoples Temple as it is to the Democrats.

The Peoples Temple used the moral drama of racism to create a racial conflict, playing on the guilt of white people and the fears of black people to divide them, threatening apocalypse and offering redemption through socialism. Racism was the source of Jones’ power. It was the primal sin and fear that he held over the heads of his followers to incite them to commit horrible crimes against each other.

And to stay silent while he committed even worse atrocities.

There is no meaningful reckoning that Americans can make with 1619, but it is vitally important that there be a reckoning with the seventies as Jonestown is becoming a statewide and nationwide model.

The latter-day Joneses promise redemption through socialism and twist America around the axis of race. Using the weight of racism, they are able to justify any crime and any abolition of rights in its name.

The ultimate victims of Jonestown were largely black. That’s also true of the Democrat Party.

Jim Jones was the first to turn racism into a religion. The end of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown are instructive now that racism has become the national religion of Jones’ Democrat Party. The cult leader had told his followers that God was socialism and that a man was as godly as he embodied socialism. And Jones was the ultimate divinity because he was the embodiment of the Principle of Socialism which alone could reconcile the races and all of humanity to paradise by becoming the gods of socialism.

“God was a liar. The snake told the truth,” Jones told his followers.

God told the truth. It’s the socialist snakes who always lie. Jim Jones promised his followers utopia, but he couldn’t deliver paradise. The people ate the poisonous apples, but never became as gods. Instead they tortured and killed, engaged in sexual debauchery of every variety, blackmailed and assassinated each other, and then died in terrible pain after first poisoning the elderly and then the children.

Also known as fighting for social justice, sexual liberation, euthanasia and abortion.

The Democrats and their media are telling the nation that burning and looting cities is the path to utopia. As Attorney General Maura Healey of Massachusetts said, “America is burning, but that’s how forests grow." Jones would beat and sexually humiliate his followers during services and tell them that they were better people for it. But the only leaders who want to beat and burn aren’t going to utopia. They are ushering in the familiar hell on earth in whose cruel flames every utopian experiment ends.

A month before the mass deaths, a Soviet diplomat visited Jonestown and listened to the men, women, and children who would soon be dead serenade him with a rendition of, “I’m a socialist today, and I’m glad." Jonestown, like the Soviet Union, Venezuela, or Cuba, was doomed even if no outside forces had intervened. It was a failed experiment in utopianism that could only end one way.

The same is becoming increasingly true of the Democrat enclaves, including in California where Jones had the most success and enjoyed the political protection of top Democrats and every major paper.

The Jonestowning of America is an act of brutal power by the Joneses and of despair by their followers.

Like Jim Jones, the Democrats have no vision or hope to offer. Utopia has been replaced with pain and death. The screams of hate and the wrecked blocks in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are the nation’s Jonestowns. The country’s biggest cities have become failed experiments in social justice where the socialist cant is preached all the louder even as things only get worse.

As the end approached, Jones took refuge in paranoid delusions and apocalyptic conflicts, inventing enemies and lashing out at them to evade responsibility for his corruption and crimes. All the radicalized Democrats have to offer are apocalyptic visions of environmental armageddons and perpetual racial atonement in a country that was irredeemably evil even over a century before its birth. Hope. Change.

The arc of history points not to progress, but to Jonestown. The Joneses are torturing their followers with pandemic lockdowns, rioting, economic destruction, environmental impoverishment, and cultural collapse to sate their own sadistic impulses and to divert attention from the failures of their ideas.

All that’s left now is the grim death march through the opening of prisons, the normalization of crime, the Green New Deal, socialized medicine, and the random crises met with tyranny on the way to utopia. At the end, the men and women who had followed Jones realized that the promise of a socialist kingdom of heaven on earth was a lie. There was no food. Bibles were being torn up for toilet paper. The only escape from the misery was death. That is also the great leftist vision for western civilization.

When our civilization lies in ruin and daily life is a miserable horror, they expect us to be ready to die. Kill the elderly in the nursing homes. And then the children. Then everyone has to drink the Kool-Aid.

The progressive leaders will say that it’s an act of mercy and courageous idealism.

"There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wondered.

The Democrats have perfected Jones’ trick of using racial guilt to empower a white elite to carry out the socialist schemes that make them feel like gods even as they impoverish, enslave, and destroy. But, just like in Jonestown, all anyone has to do is look at the carnage and ask, “Is this progress? Where’s utopia?” Are the burning cities, the kneeling mobs, and the terrorized people really leading to utopia?

Jim Jones was the socialist son of a Klansman who exploited and killed hundreds of black people. The Democrats are the socialist party of the Klan who exploited and killed hundreds of thousands of black people. When the Democrats claim to care about black lives, they take them in horrifying numbers.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.


Thursday, June 18, 2020

Xer The People

By On June 18, 2020
When peaceful protests injure hundreds and destroy entire neighborhoods, and the coronavirus infects protesters depending on the cause they’re protesting for, words don’t mean very much.

And reality itself is under siege in the minds of the men and women who run the country.

A Southern Democrat segregationist inserted “sex” into the Civil Rights Act as a poison pill.

Rep. Howard Smith had introduced what eventually became Title VII, with a letter which asked, that since there were more women than men, "why the Creator would set up such an imbalance of spinsters, shutting off the 'right' of every female to have a husband of her own, is, of course, known only to nature... but I am sure you will agree that this is a grave injustice to womankind and something the Congress and President Johnson should take immediate steps to correct... especially in this election year."

To add to the already hilarious joke, six Supreme Court justices just decided that what the Southern racist really meant by “sex” was gay and transgender because in Washington D.C. no joke is too funny that it can’t be taken seriously as a basis for judicial activism and lawsuits.

It’s still a joke, but we’re not allowed to laugh anymore.

(Image by Bosch Fawstin)

"Few in 1964 would have expected Title VII to apply to discrimination against homosexual and transgender persons. But legislative history has no bearing here," Gorsuch writes.

If the actual purpose and meaning of the law doesn’t matter, then what does?

What Gorsuch, Roberts and his leftist colleagues believe matters. Nothing else. Rights are as imaginary as gender and legislative history gets in the way of legislating from the bench.

The Gorsuch decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia finding that “sex” in Title VII covers any group having anything to do with sex in a trendy way has been described as “textual”. It’s only textual if you think the text of legislation should be read through a contemporary definition rather than the definition of the time. When President Taft’s wife was discussing their “gay season”, it didn’t mean gay any more than “sex” does. Except maybe according to Gorsuch.

But words can mean anything and nobody cares about facts anyway.

Gerald Bostock, who is at the center of this Supreme Court precedent, claims that he was fired for being gay while Clayton County claimed that the child welfare services coordinator had spent money meant for Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) at Cowtippers and F.R.O.G.S.: a cantina in Atlanta. Cowtippers does not appear in Gorsuch’s decision though it seems more germane to the question than the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water, which does.

The Gorsuch judicial activist revision of Smith’s legislation is bad news for those organizations protected by that piece of paper known as the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

"Compelling a religious organization to employ individuals whose conduct flouts the tenets of the organization’s faith forces the group to communicate an objectionable message," Justice Alito notes, paraphrasing these groups.

But these days there’s a new faith in town and people are being fired left and right for flouting it. If you run afoul of social justice mobs, your job will be gone because the company that employs you will blame you for “communicating an objectionable message”. Like the worth of all lives.

There’s a new heresy in town and the social justice inquisition is always waiting. The essential premise of that faith is that everyone must be made to kneel to it or lose their heads.

“These questions are going to create a tsunami of new litigation and create a huge amount of uncertainty going forward," Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, cautioned.

"Can a Catholic school deny employment to a teacher whose sexual lifestyle blatantly flouts millennia of Catholic moral teaching? Can an Orthodox Jewish day school refuse to hire a male teacher who self-identifies as a woman, contravening traditional teaching rooted in Genesis?" Josh Hammer, Of Counsel at the First Liberty Institute, asked.

The answer is obvious and the lawsuits are inevitable. And thus Smith’s old joke translates into the effective criminalization of traditional religious morality at the institutional level. That’s the problem with writing jokes into legislation, they end up packing a hell of a punchline.

The Gorsuch decision has put the Bible on the same level as the code of the Klu Klax Klan and that great legislator’s response to the First Amendment question is that it will be settled in future cases. There’s little doubt that it will, and on the terms of Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia.

Our constitutional legacy, like our religious foundations, is based on the belief that words matter. Judicial activism is based on the opposite belief that words can and do mean anything.

"Legislators actually won’t know what they are voting to pass—because words might change cultural meaning dramatically between the time of passage and some future court case," Russell Moore, of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, warns.

When words mean nothing, rights mean nothing. Rights derive not from foundational documents grounded in eternal truths, but from social trends and the whims of political appointees.

Bill Clinton had famously debated the meaning of “is” and of sex. Gorsuch and his five accomplices claim that they’ve settled the question of “sex”. Now comes the battle over defining “religion” and the “free exercise” of it. Are teachers in religious schools exempted? What about bookkeepers? Civil rights has long since become a zero sum game with winners and losers.

The winners advance to the next stage of suing people and the losers retreat to defending them.

Religious organizations will be forced to defend the religious role of teachers. And, once that battle is lost, the religious role of rabbis and ministers. Then they’ll be told to ‘bake the cake’.

The larger question, the one that Gorsuch so casually loses sight of in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, is where do rights come from. The Declaration of Independence had a compelling answer to that question that enabled Americans to defy the will of a king.

“All men are created equal,” wrote a long-dead Virginian whose statues are being toppled, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Equality was not in contradiction with religion, but derived from it. Our common origin as children of G-d made us equal. The whim of a court or any human ruler could not make or unmake our equality.

Contemporary judicial activism has pitted religion against equality and we are less equal for it.

Judicial activism began by taking away the equality of Natural Law and replacing it with the inequality of judicial whim which inevitably nullifies whatever good it sets out to create.

Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia reinvents the meaning of sex, based on the deeply serious work of a Dixiecrat trying to make a joke of the Civil Rights Act, while treating the First Amendment, that is the work of our Founding Fathers, as an awkward footnote. Title VII requires treating Rep. Howard Smith’s joke more seriously than the work of James Madison, and then dismissing Smith as irrelevant to the question of what sex was meant to mean.

What then is this whole thing based on beyond the prejudices of 6 contemporary justices?

As the crank said to William James, “it’s turtles all the way down.”

“Some of those who supported adding language to Title VII to ban sex discrimination may have hoped it would derail the entire Civil Rights Act. Yet, contrary to those intentions, the bill became law. Since then, Title VII’s effects have unfolded with far-reaching consequences, some likely beyond what many in Congress or elsewhere expected,” Gorsuch's opinion concedes.

Take Title VII, which was blown up out of a segregationist’s joke into the ultimate expression of protecting women as a “sex” against discrimination, which now eliminates womanhood.

As Justice Alito notes, “The effect of the Court’s reasoning may be to force young women to compete against students who have a very significant biological advantage, including students who have the size and strength of a male.”

That’s far-reaching alright compared to Smith giggling about an entitlement to husbands. Some half a century later we live in a strange new world in which the dominant elite consensus is that women don’t exist except as a set of outfits, injectable hormones and a state of mind. The most popular children’s author in the world is under attack for asserting that women really do exist.

Our elites used to mock Galileo's interrogators only to deny the existence of something far more real and obvious than the motions of planetary bodies. And the Supreme Court is on board.

Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia continues the process of ushering in a world in which rights are as fluid as the definitions of words and the shifting nature of ideas in a society going mad.

Smith’s joke continues to resound long after his death by not merely wiping out the Civil Rights Act, but the entire Bill of Rights. That old segregationist’s joke is now set to destroy, as Alito pointed out, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech and women’s rights.

The joke hath given. Now it taketh everything away.

Civil rights have come so far that women and religion both have to defend their right to exist.





Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.


Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Here Are the Heroes Whose Statues Black Lives Matter Has Attacked

By On June 16, 2020
The statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, stands at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly in Los Angeles. When the racist mobs swept through the area, looting Jewish stores and defacing synagogues with "BLM" and "Free Palestine" graffiti, the statue of a man who risked his life to resist fascism and bigotry was one of their targets.

The racists and leftists vandalizing statues across the world claim that they’re fighting hate, but their targets have often been the men and women who courageously stood up to racism and hatred.

When the statue of Churchill was vandalized in London, the thugs who did it went after the one man who had done the most to wake up the world to the threat of fascism. In Philadelphia, the thugs scrawled “murderer” and “colonizer” on a statue of Philadelphia abolitionist Matthias Baldwin and in Boston, they vandalized the ‘Glory’ monument of the African-American 54th Regiment.

In Washington D.C., the Lincoln Memorial and the National WW2 Memorial were both defaced.



This is not the work of anti-racists, but of racists. It’s not the work of anti-fascists, but of fascists.

While the media has upheld the racist narrative justifying the Taliban campaign against America by focusing on confederate memorials, the vandalism has been extensive, targeting both sides in the Civil War, and spilling over to vandalize statues that have absolutely no relevance to contemporary politics.

In Louisville, the statue of Louis XVI lost a hand and then was graffitied. Despite the French monarch having absolutely nothing to do with Floyd’s death, the statue was spray painted with "BLM", "We Will Win", and "George Floyde". If the ghost of the executed king had been hanging around Louisville, he would have been outraged and confused at being blamed for a dead man in Minneapolis.

But nobody ever accused Black Lives Matter of knowing any history beyond the 1619 Project.

In Scotland, a statue of Robert the Bruce was vandalized with the epithets “Racist King”, “BLM”, and “Robert was a racist bring down the statue”. Robert lived in the 13th century. He no doubt was very racist toward the Saxons, but It is unlikely that he had ever met a black person in Medieval Scotland.

Even more randomly, the ‘Waiting’ Statue in Harrisburg of a man reading a newspaper while waiting for a bus was covered in the red paint that the racist and leftist mobs have been using on statues. Apart from being a depiction of a fictional white man, it’s not at all clear what the statue did to deserve that.

Much like Nile Kinnick, the 1939 Heisman Trophy winner, who died in WW2, but was still vandalized.

Even minority statues didn't get a pass.

A memorial to three lynched black men was defaced in Duluth, Minnesota, to the outrage of the NAACP.

Statues of Gandhi were vandalized in New York City, Washington D.C., and London, in Bristol, England, a statue of a Jamaican playwright was covered in bleach, and in El Paso, Texas, a statue of Don Juan de Onate, a Spanish conquistador, was defaced with the message, "Your god is not my god."

The El Paso vandalism was one of a number of defacements that appeared to be motivated by religious bigotry which led to the targeting of primarily Catholic churches and Orthodox Jewish synagogues.

That included at least one statue.

In Wasco, California, St. John the Evangelist church, a mostly Latino congregation, announced on Facebook that, "Sadly somebody destroyed the statue of Sacred Heart last night."

The statue had been beheaded and had its arms chopped off.

The BLM attacks on the statues were not about fighting hate, but spreading it, defacing and defiling the values and memories that people hold dear in order to force them to kneel to its racial supremacism.

In Birmingham, Alabama, the racist thugs didn’t just go after confederate memorials, but the WW1 Doughboy memorial to the Birmingham boys who had gone off to fight in the fields of France and never returned which had been dedicated by the city’s Greek-American community. Another statue commemorating the American soldiers who had fought in the Spanish-American War was also defaced.

A statue honoring Thomas Jefferson was set on fire as the radical mob hooted and held up smartphones, but while a flame burned at the base, the great man appeared to be untouched.

In Missoula, Montana, a statue of a WW1 Doughboy was vandalized. In Pittsburgh, a WW1 memorial was defaced with a hammer and sickle to commemorate the deaths of Communist terrorists. The choice of message strongly suggests that this particular memorial vandalism had been carried out by Antifa.

Griffin's Veteran Memorial Park monuments in Atlanta were vandalized with "BLM" and "People over Property" slogans, and the Colorado Soldiers Monument was defaced in Denver.

Christopher Columbus, the bold explorer who paved the way for the settlement of the New World, was a particular target with statues of the great man vandalized in cities across the United States.

In Houston, a Columbus statue donated by the Federation of Italian-American Organizations of Greater Houston to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America had a hand chopped off, a noose placed around its neck, and the message, "Rip the head from your oppressor" taped to it.

In Miami, statues of Columbus and Ponce De Leon were defaced with "BLM", "George Floyd" and the hammer and sickle. Columbus statues were beheaded in Boston, spray painted in Pittsburgh, thrown into a lake in Richmond, and torn down in St. Paul. Camden and Wilmington, among other Democrat cities, took down statues of the great explorer on their own. Boston is likely to follow suit.

Wilmington also took down a statue of Caesar Rodney, one of the Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A statue of General Philip Schuyler, a member of the Continental Congress, the father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton, was removed by Albany's Democrat mayor.

The monument to General Kosciuszko, a Polish national hero who had served as a colonel in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, was vandalized with BLM graffiti in Washington D.C.

The statue of General Casimir Pulaski, who had fought for American independence, was also defaced.

In Boston, a statue of Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, was vandalized. Abigail had been a fervent opponent of slavery.

But it’s not just the American heroes of the past whom the un-American radicals and racists hate.

In Dover, Delaware, a memorial to fallen law enforcement officers was viciously vandalized. The statue of an officer kneeling before the list of the names of the fallen was attacked with an axe, and the state flags flying over their names were soaked in urine.

Memorials to fallen police officers were vandalized in Richmond, Virginia Beach, and Fort Worth.

"F__ the Police" was spray-painted on the California Peace Officers’ Memorial in Sacramento.

A memorial to Officer Robert Kozminski in Grand Rapids, Michigan who was killed while responding to a domestic dispute was defaced with the word, "Pig". And in Pittsburgh, a police memorial was defiled. The memorial is commemorated with the poem, "He answered the call, of himself he gave all, and a part of America died."

As every statue falls, is defiled, and disgraced, a part of America dies. When Democrats and even Republicans collude in the desecration and stand aside for the mob, a part of America dies.

The soul of a nation lies with its heroes. The radicals and racists tearing down our statues are out to destroy that soul. They want our heroes to be Karl Marx and Angela Davis, they want terrorists, totalitarians and criminals celebrated, and heroes, explorers, founders, officers and soldiers condemned.

They aren’t just coming for the “controversial” statues as the media likes to tell us.

They are coming for all the statues, for our entire history, for every great man and woman who sacrificed, strove, and struggled to move the course of human history forward by even one inch.

They are coming for America. And they intend to destroy it, one statue and one city after another.

When the history of this period is written, we will learn whether we had any heroes in our time.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Thank you for reading.


Monday, June 15, 2020

A Nazi Collaborator’s Fund Has Been Helping Finance Smears of Jews as, “White Supremacists"

By On June 15, 2020
Only a few days after Orthodox Jewish synagogues and schools were targeted by black supremacist rioters and their allies, Shais Rishon, a former Content Manager for Bend the Arc, posted a hateful image of an Orthodox Jew in a Klan hood wearing handcuffs and nooses over his Tallit surrounded by text from Jews complaining about antisemitism and violence from Black Lives Matter.

Rishon accused Jews, who had anti-Semitic slurs shouted at them, seen synagogues defaced, congregants attacked, and stores looted, of “cluck clucking” about the black supremacist riots.

The former Bend the Arc content manager had previously defended Farrakhan supporter Tamika Mallory’s slur that Jews uphold white supremacy by claiming that there is “white supremacy aplenty” in synagogues.

Shais Rishon, who goes by Ma Nishtana on social media, is a black nationalist activist who claims to have been privately ordained as a rabbi, and it was easy to see why he fit in perfectly at Bend the Arc.

Alexander Soros, on behalf of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, a PAC he founded, had endorsed Keith Ellison, a longtime member of the Nation of Islam hate group with an even longer history of antisemitism. Bend the Arc’s CEO is Stosh Cotler is a former sex club dancer and anti-Israel activist.

Like its cousins J Street and If Not Now, Bend the Arc claims to be Jewish while violently hating Jews.



When Black Lives Matter added support for BDS to its platform, Cotler blamed the Jews. Yavilah McCoy, a Bend the Arc board member who serves as a coach for the Presbyterian Church’s Auburn Theological Seminary's Pastoral Coach Training Program, had accused Jews of white supremacy. “When Jews accepted a white identity in America, they participated in sustaining white supremacy," she ranted.

When Bend the Arc talks about defeating white supremacism, it really means defeating Jews.

When House Democrats tried to deal with their internal anti-Semitism problem, they invited Bend the Arc to send in a facilitator. That facilitator got things off on the right foot with an anti-Semitic joke.

None of that is surprising because Bend the Arc is as Jewish as a ham sandwich with cheese.

Cotler had been plucked from obscurity by a project run by “Rabbi” Rachel Cowan, a Unitarian descendant of the Mayflower, who went on to wreak havoc on the Jewish community. And considering the non-Jewish billionaires who fund it, it’s a good thing that the leftist group changed its name from Jewish Funds for Justice to its current name based on a quote from an anti-Semitic Unitarian minister.

Bend the Arc scored over $14 million from Warren Buffett’s son. Why is the son of a Presbyterian agnostic pouring a fortune into an organization that claims to be promoting Jewish issues?

The group also gets $1.5 million a year from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Rockefeller clan has been accused of being many things, but being Jewish isn’t one of them. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund however does provide major funding for a spectrum of anti-Israel hate groups that back BDS. A significant amount of the funding for the infrastructure of the BDS movement comes from RBF.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has also given millions to the anti-Israel J Street lobby along with aggressively backing the propaganda campaign in favor of legalizing Iran’s nuclear program. One of its major recipients, the Ploughshares Fund, had aggressively campaigned for the Iran Deal. Its board members included Valerie Plame, who had tweeted an Unz site article titled, “America’s Jews are driving America’s wars”. This is the sort of gutter anti-Semitism that Bend the Arc is conjoined with.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund had been set up by the sons of John D. Rockefeller and funded partly by him. But that’s not all he funded. Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak credited the Rockefeller Foundation with essentially providing the blueprint for the ideology utilized in the Holocaust.

As Black noted, “The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.” Alexis Carrel, a Rockefeller beneficiary, proposed gassing "defectives" and cheered the Nazi regime for its "energetic measures against the propagation of the defective."

Rockefeller money was used to fund an institute run by Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer who promised a "total solution to the Jewish problem." His assistant was Mengele: the Nazi regime’s Frankenstein.

As his boss later noted, Mengele was "presently employed as Hauptsturmführer and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer."

The Rockefellers have always been interested in diversity.

Only in the upside-down world of the progressive movement can a Nazi collaborator’s fund that helped finance the Holocaust and has gone on to champion Iran’s nuclear program, which is meant to kill millions of Jews again, be funding programming that accuses Jews of being the real white supremacists.

A Nazi collaborator’s fund is helping finance smears of Jewish people as, “white supremacists”.

If Bend the Arc’s folks want to find the real white supremacists, they can follow their own paychecks.

Bend the Arc’s big backers, the Soros clan and the Rockefeller clan, were at best complicit in the Nazi oppression of Jews. Now they’re financing black supremacist trolls who arrogantly tell Jewish people that if they don’t like their synagogues being vandalized, they’re white supremacists.

If you oppose the new Kristallnacht, you’re a Nazi.

This obscene inversion turns Jews into Nazis, and racial supremacists who quote Hitler-lover Stokely Carmichael into the new Jews. Perpetrators became victims and victims are turned into perpetrators. The police are the criminals, and the criminals are oppressed victims. Jews who don’t want their synagogues vandalized are Nazis, and anti-Jewish groups funded by Nazi collaborators are the real Jews.

Bend the Arc's Twitter account tweeted an article by Rebecca Pierce, an anti-Israel activist with JVP and If Not Now, who had accused Jews of white supremacy, in which she wrote of the riots, "property destruction becomes a symbolic tool." Much like Kristallnacht. There was a lot of symbolism there too.

The new Klan are Orthodox Jews cleaning Black Lives Matter graffiti off their synagogues.

Bend the Arc has gone on championing behavior that threatens Jews while working closely with Black Lives Matter, an anti-Semitic group that endorses BDS and whose activists have triggered attacks on Jewish establishments. Meanwhile the hate group keeps claiming that it’s Jewish and represents Jews.

As Jewish as John D. Rockefeller, George Soros, and Peter Buffett.

What would inspire Buffett’s son and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to plow a combined $26 million into Bend the Arc? As Sean Cooper’s Bending the Jews notes, neither have a history of giving to Jewish causes. But Bend the Arc isn’t a Jewish cause. It’s a radical lefty cause that occasionally targets Jews, preying on them as useful idiots or targets for its inflexible hostility to the American way of life.

Like its counterparts, Bend the Arc has adopted the Unitarian approach of performative political religion in which community organizers function as clergy and treat political chants as inspirational prayers. The distinctions between the Quaker summer camp and Unitarian Church youth movement that Cowan née Brown credited with inspiring her and Bend the Arc is which religious tradition they’ve hollowed out.

Unlike its partner If Not Now, Bend the Arc hasn’t even bothered appropriating a Jewish expression.

Bend the Arc’s name, as its CEO Stosh Cotler noted, “comes from a sermon by a 19th century Unitarian Minister named Theodore Parker.”

Parker was a transcendentalist minister in the Unitarian Church who hated Jews.

In all fairness, Parker hated a lot of people. The Unitarian minister, whose phrase about the moral arc of the universe always bending toward justice became Obama's go-to line, was a career bigot.

The abolitionist hero was prone to saying things like, "the Irishman will always lie if it is for his momentary interest" and describing the Irish as the "N___ of the South". And while he fought vigorously for the rights of slaves, he also insisted that there was "no doubt the African race is greatly inferior."

The minister, whose sermon gave its name to Bend the Arc, reserved a special contempt for Jews, which may be because he disliked the bible, which he believed, was the work of “bigoted Jews.”

The Jewish intellect, Parker ranted in one letter, was “pinched in those narrow foreheads”. Jews are "lecherous", "incline to despotism", and "were always cruel".

"I doubt not they did sometimes kill a Christian baby at the Passover," he speculated.

That is the origin of Bend the Arc’s name. Jews are being accused of white supremacy by an organization named after a line from an actual white supremacist whose funding derives from a Nazi collaborator.

The moral arc of Bend the Arc will always bend toward antisemitism.







Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Sunday, June 14, 2020

Escape From Minneapolis

By On June 14, 2020
If Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender didn’t exist, Portlandia would have had to invent her.

After a degree from UC Berkeley, Bender worked for a New York City bike lobby, then did a stint in San Francisco, before she went back to Minneapolis to work for Minnesota’s DOT on bike lanes while running the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition whose burning passion was putting bike lanes everywhere.

Militant bike activists are the dumbest and most loathed figures in urban civics. No group of people is as entitled, obnoxious, or clueless as a bunch of white hipsters in lycra shorts out to convince city officials that giving them more bike lanes will end wars, eliminate racism, and save the planet. There was only one possible career pathway for Bender in Minneapolis. Urban planning through politics as a DFLer.

Once in office, Bender began transforming entire streets into bike lanes. The plan was to have 60% of the residents of Minneapolis using bikes, walking, or taking the bus by 2030. Nobody bothered drawing up a budget for how much this plan would cost because that would have just rained on the parade.

Or rather snowed on it because Minneapolis gets an average of 100 days of snow.



Last year, Minneapolis bike advocates were whining because the police had been ordering them to stay out of the snow. One complained that he was angry that the cops might have terrified "my fellow cyclists and pedestrians who are less privileged than myself… who may have been much more frightened in these sort of interactions than my cismale, white, straight-presenting self."

The cismale rider was typical of Lisa Bender’s base of upscale hipsters renting condos in the ‘Wedge’.

Meanwhile Lisa Bender was being ticketed for not shoveling snow off her own sidewalk while telling everyone else to do it. In predictable fashion, she blamed the resulting scandal on sexism.

Despite Bender’s ambitions, the bike lanes were largely going unused. And, on top of that, the Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition, which had changed its name to Our Streets, opposed traffic enforcement because it was racist. And how do you keep cars out of bike lanes without traffic regulations?

But Lisa Bender and Mayor Jacob Frey, the student government that have become the laughingstocks of a nation and the death of a city, had a bigger vision for Minneapolis. They wanted it to be more like New York City with high urban density, lots of mixed-used buildings with families living on top of businesses, and people living in small cubes and pods, while biking to their favorite artisanal coffee shops.

Actually, maybe Bender and Frey didn’t want Minneapolis to be New York City, just a giant campus.

Minneapolis still isn’t a college campus, but it has the first student council to run a major city. Besides Bender, there’s Keith Ellison’s son, who describes himself as a "visual artist, storyteller, and political organizer", Phillipe Cunningham, whose bio is, "progressive, Black, queer & trans", Lisa Goodman, "activist and dog mom", and assorted other characters who ought to be debating at the student center.

Instead they’re determining the fate of a city and a country without having a clue about anything.

But it was the voters of Minneapolis who voted for DFL Democrats and let them trash their city because promised them a glorious future of bike lanes, diversity, and saving the planet.

Minneapolis had lots of older homes. Preservationists wanted them kept and remodeled. But the student council government running the city wanted them destroyed and replaced with glass boxes. Since there were still too many homes, Bender championed an end to single-family zoning and got her way. Now there was nothing standing in the way of her vision of turning Minneapolis into a campus.

Except reality.

Frey, Bender, and the rest of the aging college gang, were selling Minneapolis the same bill of goods that Buttigieg had sold South Bend, and that numerous other young and eager student council members had sold other declining cities, that with more bikes, glass boxes, and green energy, they would attract dot coms that would build their own versions of Facebook and Amazon in their cities generating billions.

If Bender was a character out of Portlandia, her enablers had sprung straight from South Park.

Nobody involved in this knew how anything worked. They just knew that they wanted young people with degrees from big bicoastal colleges to move back and turn Minneapolis into the future. Also, they wanted diversity, environmentalism, and lots of biking in a city where it snows 100 days of the year.

While Frey and Bender were trying to turn Minneapolis into a millennial sandbox, there were real problems closer to home. Bender’s own neighborhood, Lowry Hill East or the ‘Wedge’, was a white hipster enclave with rising crime. The regular muggings were perpetrated in the ‘Wedge’ by people from outside the neighborhood. The Lowry Hill East Neighborhood Association (LHENA) had coped with the problem in the past by getting off-duty MPD cops to patrol the neighborhood and fight crime.

This year, there was a spike in robberies. The rise in crime hit the Wedge, which was at the center of Bender’s vision of an influx of hipsters renting condos, while also attracting muggers and thieves. Once the riots began, things only got worse. Local communities turned vigilante and began blocking off streets while volunteers patrolled retail areas to deter looters.

Even before the Minneapolis student council government decided to defund the police, law enforcement had already been replaced, not because of Bender’s legislation, but because the city’s services had broken down, and it was not replaced by something new, but something very old.

The local militia.

In the aftermath, Bender is championing defunding the police. Just like all her other plans, she has no idea how to do it, but it’s a trendy lefty cause and without those, she would be working at Starbucks.

On social media and CNN, Bender has explained that the only way defunding the police will work is if people check their privilege and refuse to call the police when they’re being robbed or mugged. Some of the condo residents biking in the snow might go along with that, but most people aren’t going to do it. If there are no police, they will set up neighborhood watches and eventually those will be armed.

Minneapolis City Council members have claimed that policing is rooted in white supremacy. That’s the kind of dumb thing a freshman student would say in a social justice class. Law enforcement is how local governments provide security in a lawful manner. Remove the law enforcement and you also take away the law and the security. But there are older laws than those of Minneapolis and the United States.

Defund the police and some people will lose their property to looters while others will fight them. When there is no law enforcement, the only law that will matter is the law of force.

Frey, Bender, and their student council politics are ushering in Minneapolis’ Lord of the Flies. But that’s what happens when you put a student government and its campus politics in charge of a major city.

The good news is that Minneapolis is finally becoming more like New York City. And New York City is becoming more like Minneapolis. Civilization is collapsing in both of those cities in the same way. There will be glass box condos, feminist poetry readings in hipster bars, and lots of bike lanes everywhere. And when you need help, you don’t call the police, you call your neighbors or take matters into your own hands. When you defund the police, the people who lose out are the isolated and the weak. And we all lose because when the only law is that of force then civilization gives way to savagery.

Bike lanes are useless when you can’t leave the house and glass boxes are easy to break into.

Lisa Bender and her colleagues, who have more identity politics credentials than competence, promised to transform Minneapolis into a futuristic utopia of glass boxes, mass transit, bike lanes, environmentalism and diversity. Now, Minneapolis doesn’t need those things, if it ever needed them.

All Minneapolis needs is a way to stop people from killing and robbing each other in its streets.

It’s a good thing then that Bender and the rest of the council are defunding the police.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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